The Industry

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED? Scott Rudin, the storied and implacable producer of The Hours, ought to be feeling on top of the mountain. So why's he threatening to jump off?

SCOTT RUDIN is not feeling the love. Almost every morning throughout the anxiety-filled Oscar campaign, he has picked up the papers and decided that he's getting shorted again. There are little black-and-white ads for his movie, The Hours, while other studios have bought big, splashy spreads for their contenders. Despite his years of turning out hit movies, from Sister Act to South Park, this is the powerful producer's first shot ever at a Best Picture award, and he is convinced that Paramount is blowing it.

Rudin's constant complaints have started to upset studio chief Sherry Lansing, who asserts that The Hours represents Paramount's most aggressive Oscar campaign ever. And the studio has been nominated for Best Picture four other times in the past ten years and won three. "That's a great track record," she says.

Others at Paramount are livid over Rudin's harangues. A top Paramount executive says Rudin should be grateful that The Hours got a nod when other strong contenders like About Schmidt and Adaptation were passed over. "Three women who kill themselves and a guy dies of AIDS?" this executive sputters, sacrificing accuracy in the heat of passion. "Somebody should say, 'How the fuck did you get that nominated?' "

The miracle, though, is not that the Academy embraced this grim film but that Paramount agreed to make it in the first place. The Hours exists because of the will of Scott Rudin. He is one of the last of the mogul producers--a notorious hurler of objects and invective, a showman who can charm the stars. He combines a powerful commercial instinct with a passion for material. His eclectic filmography veers from The First Wives Club to Wonder Boys, from The Addams Family to The Truman Show, from The Firm to The Hours.

Yet after more than ten years, Rudin's relationship with Paramount appears to be on the verge of rupture. If so, it won't be pretty. Rudin, forty-four, still has a couple of years left on his contract, and Paramount has no intention of letting him out. "We don't reward that kind of behavior," sniffs a top studio executive.

Rudin says he's prepared for an ugly fight if he decides that the time has come to leave. "These people can give you a lot of pain when they're trying to make a movie with you," he says. "Imagine what they can do when they're just trying to give you pain."

While it's possible that all the parties may yet pull back, the souring of this relationship says as much about the movie business generally and Paramount in particular as it does about the outsized showman who has stirred up all this ill feeling. It represents a bone-grinding clash between an ambitious, willful producer and a studio that has become known for playing it very, very safe. It is a story without a hero.

Over the years, Rudin has delivered more than thirty pictures for Paramount. And many have been hits. You'd think the studio, schlepping along in the last year with awful movies like The Four Feathers, Serving Sara, and Star Trek: Nemesis, would do all in its power to make Rudin--by far the biggest fish in the studio's depleted pond--feel the love.

But Rudin has described the process of dealing with the studio as "enervating." He's told Lansing that he'd rather have trailers for his upcoming films attached to the next Matrix installment (which belongs to Warner) than Paramount's big shot for the summer, Tomb Raider II. And perhaps most damaging of all, he's complained to outsiders that Lansing and her boss, Jon Dolgen, no longer seem to care much about the movies--and no longer have the stomach to bet on less-than-obvious projects. "He said he doesn't understand what happened to them over the last five years," says one confidant. "They're all tired."

Lansing, one of the industry's longest serving and most lethally charming studio chiefs, insists that Paramount is only using good business sense. "It's my job to deal with the economic realities," she says. "Paramount's slate has been profitable for the past ten years. . . . This year we've reinvigorated the Jack Ryan franchise. We made Changing Lanes and the surprise hit How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and obviously The Hours. We're doing good work."

Still, Rudin is not alone in his dismay. Agents complain bitterly that Paramount's representations in negotiations are unreliable and that its choices are only about avoiding risk. "You know you're going to waste your time trying to sell new directors and new talent there," says an agent who represents a very important star. Director Steven Soderbergh is said to have called Paramount "the place where dreams go to die."

Ironically, a Paramount executive says Soderbergh's displeasure with the studio stems from a long-ago fight in which the studio took Rudin's part against him. And it's true that Rudin isn't exactly Hollywood's best-loved player. His abuse of assistants has become legend. Like the tale of the legally blind assistant who had to keep calling cabs and then sending them away because he was fired and unfired over and over in one day. Rudin says that one's true.

Rudin uses an army of six assistants to micromanage everything from his beard trims to heavier obligations. It's not easy: In Rudin's world, his every whim rises to the level of an imperative, and he insists on controlling everything but himself. "The key to Scott is he will yell at you equally if you give him the wrong flavor Frozfruit or screw up a $100 million deal," says a former Rudin executive.

Turnover is high. "I was there for three years and saw probably 150 to 200 people come and go--without exaggeration," says an ex-staffer. "Some people lasted a day, a week." The verbal tirades were memorable, he continues. "You're a fucking waste of skin" was one fre-quent Rudin volley.

Though he's invariably charming to stars, Rudin doesn't confine his rudeness to underlings. His most notorious habit is a strategy of returning calls when he knows the other party won't be around--even if that party happens to be a studio chief. Often, Rudin has his assistants place calls at an absurdly early or late hour, when no one is likely to answer the phone. "Between his offices in New York and L. A., he's pretty much got fifteen hours, sixteen hours a day covered," an ex-employee explains. The game "went on for hours and hours and hours every morning," he continues.

Asked to explain the point of this behavior, Rudin--who cheerfully disclaims any shame about his tantrums--starts to sputter. "I don't . . . I'm not . . . let's move on," he says impatiently. "It's bullshit, a waste of energy. I'm not discussing this."

Between his bad behavior and his success, Rudin has made many enemies. One Oscar-decorated producer says animus toward Rudin is so great that the Producers Guild didn't include The Hours among the six films nominated for its top award this year. "To nominate a movie like My Big Fat Greek Wedding over The Hours is appalling," says this observer. "But there are so many people who have been screwed; they wouldn't even nominate Scott, because they loathe him." (Rudin says he has nothing but contempt for the guild and has refused to join.)

What makes studio executives put up with Rudin, despite it all, is his exceptional ability to achieve consistent commercial success over the years. But even though he is securely in the top tier of Hollywood producers, two of the industry's top prizes have eluded him: the breakout hit and the Oscar on the mantel. Rudin's top-grossing film was The Firm, which pulled in a strong but not mind-boggling $158 million. And though he's made a number of artistically ambitious films--Marvin's Room, The Royal Tenenbaums, Iris--none were ever even nominated in the Best Picture category.

Recent tangles with Paramount seem to have diminished his chances of changing his luck. Rudin may have thought he had a shot at a big, multipicture franchise when he signed on to produce a film based on the popular mock-Gothic Lemony Snicket children's books (appropriately titled A Series of Unfortunate Events). There have been nine books in the series, all best-sellers. Rudin, eyeing a Harry Potter--like opportunity, signed director Barry Sonnenfeld, who made The Addams Family with him, and Jim Carrey agreed to star.

But Paramount fought hard over the budget. With visual effects and Carrey's fee, the cost ballooned to more than $100 million. The studio insisted on driving down the price. Rudin and Sonnenfeld spent the better part of last year developing the property while budget negotiations ground on. Eventually Rudin and Sonnenfeld worked the price down to a number in the mid-nineties that they thought the studio was prepared to accept.

Yet with a crew in the midst of preparation for filming, Lansing balked. She insisted that the studio had always taken the position that the budget could not exceed $85 million. Rudin says this was news to him--so unexpected that he felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight. And Sonnenfeld's agent, David O'Connor, confirms that the studio changed the rules. "The $85 million figure came as a complete surprise to everybody and had never been discussed," he says.

In fact, many who deal with Paramount say the tactic is routine. But Lansing maintains that parties to a negotiation often fail to listen when the studio names a number. "We're always clear," she says. "The problem is, they don't hear you. You say eighty to eighty-five and they think it means a hundred."

Meanwhile, another Lemony Snicket battle was waged over the amount of gross profit that would be paid to the key players. Lansing says Paramount wanted to hold the line at 25 percent. But with Carrey, Rudin, and Sonnenfeld involved, that became tough. (Carrey alone usually gets 20 percent.) All three agreed to reduce their usual participation, and finally they came within one and a half percentage points of the studio's goal. But Paramount still wouldn't go forward.

At that point, Rudin quit the project. "I found the amount of energy being poured into this circle jerk frustrating and debilitating and completely unrewarding and painful," he says. "And I felt that my talent relationships had been compromised by it. And since I wasn't going to win, my only choice seemed to be to not play. The only thing I felt in walking away from it was relief."

Sonnenfeld stayed on and kept trying to shave down the movie's cost. But Paramount decided to do what it and other studios so often do: find a partner to help pay the bills. And it turned to the one studio that Sonnenfeld absolutely wanted to avoid: DreamWorks. (Sonnenfeld had feuded with strong-willed DreamWorks executive Walter Parkes during the making of Men in Black II.)

Sure enough, Sonnenfeld was promptly forced off the project. To Sonnenfeld's agent, it seemed that his client had been brutally betrayed after nearly a year of work. And he didn't believe Paramount's claim that it had tried to find another partner. "Warner Brothers, Universal, Fox, MGM, and Intermedia are among the potential partners not contacted for this movie," O'Connor says. "So I ask you, How hard did Paramount actually look for a partner after DreamWorks said they were interested?"

Rudin threatened to break with Paramount altogether if the studio ended up giving Parkes a bigger piece of the gross than he would have gotten to make the film. The studio settled the matter by agreeing to pay Rudin $1.25 million as well as 2.5 percent of the profit on any Lemony Snicket films. All told, between preproduction costs and the payoffs to Rudin and Sonnenfeld, Paramount ended up sinking several million dollars into a project that would now essentially start over.

No doubt, Paramount derived lots of comfort from getting DreamWorks involved. The studios can split the bill, and with DreamWorks on board, Steven Spielberg is helping to shape the material. But Rudin feels that bringing in a partner was a sign of weakness. "I found the entire enterprise relentlessly depressing in what it said about the way movies get made today," he says.

But a high-level Paramount executive says what's really troubling Rudin has less to do with the studio or the movie business than his own doubts. "When he wants to get out, he blames the deal," this executive says. "You don't blow a deal over a point. He was nervous about the material, the concept, Barry . . . about a hundred things that he'd never admit."

So it was at this delicate moment that the Oscar wars began, and Rudin watched anxiously as his beloved child--The Hours--was sent into battle.

Paramount had balked at financing the film in the first place and had Rudin bring in Miramax to help pay the bills. (Paramount wound up putting only $3.5 million into the film, which cost about $20 million.) For Rudin, the partnership with Miramax turned into a bruising experience. He and Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein had collaborated and clashed often before on films, including Marvin's Room and Iris.

The two men--outsized, rapacious, hostile--have certain traits in common. And they fought over many issues--most notably over Miramax's concerns about Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose. (On that point, Rudin has had the satisfaction of proving that he was entirely right.) Having stood his ground on a number of creative issues, Rudin made a film that scored strong critical response and, yes, nine Oscar nominations. But Weinstein, who has always been much more effective at pushing the Academy's buttons, emerged with a dazzling forty nominations for films bearing the Miramax stamp--including four of the five nominees for Best Picture.

Rudin feared that Weinstein's foot soldiers were more experienced and aggressive Oscar campaigners than Paramount's were. He began to complain about Paramount's handling of the film. He didn't quite believe that Lansing really connected with the picture, despite her protestations that she loved it. After all, at one point she had suggested cutting the kisses. (Weinstein had some problems with the kissing, too.)

Rudin berated Lansing relentlessly for running "wallet sized" ads when other Oscar contenders had full color over two pages. While the advertising materials were good, he says, "my issue was with the spend." To Rudin, it wasn't just frustrating--it was lonely.

But to Paramount executives, it was outrageous. After all, it wasn't their first Best Picture nomination; it was Rudin's.

The night Rudin won the Golden Globe, Lansing told him, "I'm the longest relationship you've ever had in your life." She wanted to remind him of their shared past. She didn't want to break up. And maybe he doesn't, either. "Intelligent people can disagree on a movie-to-movie basis, but the simple fact is, I got to make most of the movies I wanted to make at Paramount," he acknowledges. "I hope the relationship can morph back into what it was for the years we've worked together."

Certainly, he says, he knows life wouldn't necessarily be better elsewhere. "I know the disagreements that we're trying to work through right now are metaphors for what's happening in the movie industry--the argument between culture and commerce, risk and safety, comfort versus challenge," he says. So maybe Rudin just wants to sweeten his deal. Or maybe he's seeking a regime change at Paramount. Or maybe what he really fears is that even if something changed, everything for him would remain the same.

THE SCOUTING REPORT

» Oliver Stone has two documentaries coming up for HBO, one on Fidel Castro and the other on the Palestinian uprising. But he denies the rumor that he's been thinking of doing a series on the world's dictators, saying he passed up an opportunity to interview Saddam Hussein. "He's a very stiff and formal man," Stone says. "The other two documentaries are more fun." He doesn't deny that he'd like to have a go at North Korea's Kim Jong-Il next, but for now, Stone is busy overseas working on his film about Alexander the Great. "If I'm in Europe now," he points out pragmatically, "I can't be in Korea."

» Prolific producer Joe Roth (Maid in Manhattan, Anger Management) thought he had found his next directing assignment, following 2001's America's Sweethearts. It was The Great Debaters, a much different sort of film, about a black debating team in Texas in 1935. The picture is Oprah Winfrey's baby; Roth--who ran the Disney studio when it ate Winfrey's Beloved--got involved after Miramax issued a letter putting it in turnaround. No sooner did Roth start looking for a writer than Miramax, which reported to Roth when he was at Disney, took the unusual step of claiming that the earlier missive dumping the project had been a mistake. Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein says he knew nothing of Roth's interest in the project and simply realized--belatedly--that it was too good to turn away. "I screwed up," he says.

» What is it about Mike Medavoy? Hollywood was surprised to learn that the independent producer and his wife, Irena, are suing a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and the makers of Botox, alleging that the toxin had made Irena severely ill. (She received the Botox treatment, according to the complaint, to alleviate migraines.) Medavoy is claiming loss of consortium, though it appears that the socially active Irena has not been entirely bedridden. Irena has always been a big party presence. One gets an idea of her style from her own account of her Oscar-night plans a couple years ago, when she borrowed a $30,000 gown and an eighteenth-century diamond-and-pearl choker: "The necklace is listed at $65,000, then you have $40,000 in your ears," she confided to USA Today. "All in all, it's at least a $100,000 night." What might be making her husband's sorrow all the deeper is the fact that history seems to be repeating itself: His last blond wife, Patricia Duff, said in 1992 that she had contracted chronic-fatigue syndrome redecorating the multimillion-dollar mansion that she and Medavoy built in Coldwater Canyon. Not long after, she ran off with Ron Perelman. --K. M.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.